The Canon · No. 063
Catharism
The Albigensians; the Good Men
c.1140 – c.1330 CE · Esoteric / Occult · Extinct · Languedoc, Lombardy, the Rhineland
V. THE MEDIEVAL WORLD — c.500 – 1500 CE
How many
None. Exterminated.
Who began it
No founder. Related to the Bogomils of the Balkans, from whom the doctrine appears to have travelled west.
What it is for
To escape a world the Cathars regarded as the creation of an evil god, and to live as the apostles had.
What it worships
A good God of spirit and light. The material world was made by an evil creator, identified with the God of the Old Testament or with Satan.
What it holds
Dualism, in absolute or mitigated form. Souls are fallen angels imprisoned in flesh and reincarnated until liberated. Christ was a spirit who only appeared to have a body, so the crucifixion saves nobody and the cross is an instrument of torture rather than a symbol of hope. The Catholic Church is the church of the enemy. Sacraments, relics, purgatory, and the material Eucharist are all rejected.
What it does
A two-tier community. The perfecti, both men and women, took the consolamentum, a laying-on of hands that was the only sacrament, and thereafter lived in absolute celibacy, poverty and a diet excluding all products of coition — meat, eggs, dairy, though fish was permitted. The credentes, believers, lived normally and took the consolamentum on their deathbed. Some who recovered undertook the endura, a fast to death, to avoid falling back. Women could be perfecti and preach, which the Catholic Church could not match and which is one reason the movement spread.
After death
The soul reincarnates until it receives the consolamentum, then returns to the good God as an angel. Failure means another body. There is no hell other than this world, which is hell already — a striking inversion.
Its texts
Almost nothing survives. The Interrogatio Iohannis and a Cathar ritual in Occitan. The best source is paradoxically the Inquisition register of Jacques Fournier (1318–1325), later Pope Benedict XII, whose meticulous interrogations of the village of Montaillou were turned by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in 1975 into one of the most vivid portraits of medieval peasant life ever written.
Its branches
Absolute dualists (two eternal principles) and mitigated dualists (a fallen creator); related Bogomils and Paulicians.
Of note
Catharism matters out of proportion to its size because destroying it produced the Inquisition and set the template for crusade against Christians. Note also that essentially everything we know comes from the people who exterminated it.
Its timeline
- c.1140s CE Cathar communities documented in the Rhineland and Languedoc.
- 1167 CE Council of Saint-Félix organises Cathar bishoprics.
- 1208 CE The papal legate Pierre de Castelnau is murdered.
- <strong>1209–1229 CE</strong> The Albigensian Crusade. At Béziers in 1209 the population is massacred; the legate is reported to have said kill them all, God will know his own. Casualty estimates for the crusade run from 200,000 to a million, and it destroys the independent culture of Occitania.
- 1231 CE The papal Inquisition is created, substantially in response to Catharism. This is the institution's origin.
- 1244 CE Montségur falls. Around 220 perfecti walk into a mass pyre rather than recant.
- 1321 CE Guillaume Bélibaste, the last known perfectus in Languedoc, is burned.
- c.1330 CE Catharism extinct.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.